


Worth It

by the_musical_alchemist



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Royai - Freeform, Smut, fmab - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:55:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_musical_alchemist/pseuds/the_musical_alchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He didn’t say a word at first, but was nothing short of gentle with her, peppering longing, desire, adoration, and a myriad of that which he can never express out loud in the form of kisses all across her skin. They both knew this was dangerous. But after facing your own death in two different wars, and waking up every day as if it may be your last, danger begins to wane on its meaning. </i>
</p><p>It's not exactly explicit, but it does get kind of...sexy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worth It

“Captain.”

Riza glances up from the stack of paperwork on her desk. The General was close to silent walking in. Or perhaps she had just been fully absorbed in her work. Across from her, Breda nods at his superior before returning his attention to the documents before him. He chews absently on his pen as he reads. Something Riza may have chastised him for a few months ago, before her comrades were scattered about the country. Now that they’ve all returned to Mustang’s command, she finds she’s more lenient toward the littler things. She’ll never admit how naked she felt without her team. How walking into work every day, falling into step behind Bradley instead of her then-Colonel, was equivalent to sleeping without a blanket on a cold night.

“General,” Riza says, setting her pen down. He looks rested, she thinks. For the first time in too long, there are no shadows under his eyes and the lineaments that normally fissure decades into his weary face have softened.

“I need those documents before five today.” He takes a seat at his desk and pulls open a drawer. Without looking up, he adds, “Any additional reports?”

“Yes,” she says, her heart rate remarkably steady. “And no, sir. Nothing since this morning.”

He nods in her direction and extracts a stack of papers that he sets on his desk. For a moment, he stares with dread, then sighs.

“Didn’t you say you were going to take that work home with you last night, Boss?” Havoc asks.

The General narrows his eyes at him, though with little venom. It isn’t that reprimanding Havoc feels like walking on eggshells, but that no one on the team can actually bring themselves to feel anything but overwhelming relief that he’s back in uniform, and more importantly, back on his feet.

“I did,” Mustang agrees with a halfhearted shrug. “But something came up.”

To that, Riza blinks and averts her eyes to the desk. She remains collected, but her heart, at last, begins to race.

* * *

_He didn’t say a word at first, but was nothing short of gentle with her, peppering longing, desire, adoration, and a myriad of that which he can never express out loud in the form of kisses all across her skin. They both knew this was dangerous. But after facing your own death in two different wars, and waking up every day as if it may be your last, danger begins to wane on its meaning._

_Or maybe he’d just grown selfish. Maybe he didn’t want to waste anymore time. Maybe it dawned on him that day in the tunnels, as she lay in a pool of blood, what-ifs, and broken possibilities, that the greatest danger he’d faced was the perpetual ache in his chest. The one he’s learned to quell after years of pain, to the point that he’d almost grown immune to it. The one that loves her with every living piece of him._

* * *

 

“Which means a date,” Breda says with a laugh. Havoc scowls and begins to pore over a file sitting on his desk.

“Mind leaving at least a fraction of Amestris’s women for the rest of us, General?” he mutters.

“So, who was it this time?” Breda asks, elbowing Havoc in the rib. “Anyone Havoc knows?”

Riza’s eyes scan the page in front of her, but the text seems to dissolve the moment it reaches her brain. She hears the General chuckle.

“I have work to do,” he says, a smile curving his voice.

Breda snorts. “Work.”

“I  _am_  a General now,” he points out. “I have responsibilities. Besides, so what if it was a date? I’m not obligated to keep every overtime promise I make.”

“How did she look?” Breda asks, to which Havoc rolls his eyes. “We want a number, one to ten. Right, Havoc?”

* * *

 

_When he finally made it back to her lips, they melted into a kiss. It made him wonder, for one fleeting moment, how blindness could have ever seemed like such a burden. The entire world dripped from her fingertips and sank into his skin, drifting through his body in hot currents. There was nothing he couldn’t see. Nothing he couldn’t understand. Everything was in her touch, her kiss, her body. His senses burst into color, even behind his closed eyes. It was a delicious kind of agony. Ugly, and painful, and terrifying, but with beauty, euphoria, and a sense of all things right slipping in between._

_He pulled away, enough to brush his lips against hers. Her chest rose and fell beneath his, in perfect sync with his heart._

_“Beautiful,” he whispered against her mouth. “You’re beautiful.”_

_She chuckled, brushing her fingers through his hair. “How can you tell? Your eyes are closed.”_

_He traced up the curve of her waist with his fingertips, over the swell of her breast, finally cupping her cheek. His thumb followed the contours of her face. He wanted so badly to kiss her again._

_He could tell because he didn’t need eyes to see her. What made her beautiful went far beyond the softness of her lips or the vibrant color in her cheeks. Beyond the cracked, calloused skin on her hands, hands that belonged to a warrior. Her deep, insistent voice, hardened from torment but softened by the inherent gentleness not even the most dreadful memories could take from her._

_What made her beautiful was more profound. It was the beat of her heart and the language of her touch. Notes and pulses that have grown palpable. A code he’s learned to decipher. One that has more meaning to him than words ever could._

_“Beautiful,” he repeated, sinking into another kiss._

* * *

 

Riza doesn’t dare look up. Something in the air shifts above their heads. If she is to steal a glance, she imagines the General will look amused.

“I can’t put a numerical value on that kind of beauty,” he says. By the playfulness lilting his voice, it’s easy to disguise it as nothing more than a jab at Havoc. But something tugs at Riza’s stomach, filling it with warmth.

“Either she’s really hot or really gross and you just don’t want to admit it,” Breda decides.

“Definitely not the latter,” the General says. Riza hears his pen scrape against the page on his desk. “But that’s irrelevant. Get back to work. And, Captain?”

“Yes, sir?” she responds, a little too quickly. Without realizing, she tightens her grip on her pen. She tries not to focus on the low pitch of his voice, or the recollection of how his throat vibrated under her lips when he spoke last night.

“When you get the chance, please look these over.” In gesture, he waves a form in her direction. Then he meets her eyes, and something instantly liquifies in his glance. She holds his gaze for a second longer than necessary, stifling the memory of his nose brushing down the bare skin on her stomach.

“Of course, sir,” she says, and drops her eyes to the documents on her desk as prickles of heat threaten to creep up her neck.

“Thank your stars for Captain Hawkeye,” says Havoc affectionately. “Given how easily you drop your work for play, sir.”

“Without her busting your ass, you’d probably still be a Major,” Breda adds.

Riza rolls her eyes, but does not engage. She retains the vague focus she has on her work. The General laughs easily.

“As great as my adjutant may be,” he says, “I think I’m more than qualified here.”

“Careful, sir,” she says coolly, going through her stack. “Havoc might be onto something.”

* * *

 

_Halfway down her stomach, he felt her body shake under his lips. When he looked up, he saw that her head was tilted back. She was laughing._

_“I didn’t realize I was a comically awful lover,” he teased, kissing the implausibly soft skin above her belly button._

_“Think about this for a moment,” she said in between chuckles. He ran both hands over her hips, letting them rest on her waist. His thumbs moved back and forth over her warm skin right below her ribs, because he just couldn’t touch her enough. As if the moment he moved away, she would turn to smoke and vanish._

_“About what?” he asked, his glance catching the golden spill of hair that fell over her pillow._

_“Us...doing this,” she said. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her sound this carefree and amused since before the war. When he was just an apprentice and she was his master’s daughter. No ranks or titles weighing them down._

_Before she was Lieutenant, Captain, or Hawkeye. When she was just Riza._

_“What, you’ve never fraternized with a superior officer?” He laughed, pressing his nose to the center of her stomach and moving over her until it found the space between her breasts. “Hawkeye, I am flummoxed.”_

_“There are laws,_ General _,” she said, playfully punctuating with his rank. Her hands moved up his back, the pads of her fingers tracing the indentations between his muscles and finally burying_ _into his hair. “Anyway, that isn’t what I meant.”_

_“Care to elaborate?” he asked, pressing a kiss to her sternum._

_“You and I,” she said, entangling her fingers with his hair. Goosebumps rose on his arms from the feeling of it. “Together like this.”_

_“Ah, yes,” his lips moved to her collarbone where he left a trail of kisses up her neck and behind her ear. His breath stirred her hair, tickling her when he spoke. “Can’t say I ever expected I’d actually be in bed with my bodyguard, naked nevertheless. But I can’t say I’m complaining either.”_

_She laughed again, and this time he joined her. He buried his face into the crook of her neck and before long, the two were close to hysterical._

_“It really isn’t that funny,” he choked out, which made him lose it even more. Riza draped one of her forearms over her eyes, and the burst of laughter that shook her beneath him seemed to have found its way inside of Roy, gripping him by the heart. They couldn’t stop. His stomach ached, as he’s sure hers did as well._

_But they just couldn’t damn well stop._

* * *

 

“As we know,” Riza continues, the side of her mouth quirking a little, “I’m not one for fun.”

“Unless it involves firearms,” Havoc says and when Riza shoots him a look, he smiles charmingly and winks.

From his desk, the corners of Mustang’s lips curl up subtly, but he doesn’t contribute further to the discussion. After a few seconds, Riza sees that his workload has begun to take over and anything beyond their plans for Ishval has ceased to exist. By example, Riza brings her own attention back to the forms on her desk.

Huh. Who would have ever imagined out of the two of them,  _she’d_  be the one distracted.

* * *

 

_“Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked. She climbed on top of him, rolling her hips perhaps involuntarily against his, bringing a wave of heat to the base of his spine._

_“Do you even have to ask?” she replied, a soft grin forming at the end of what he suddenly realized was something of a private joke between them._

_Lightly, her fingers brushed the smooth, splotchy patch of scar tissue that marred his abdomen. The memory of that day suddenly felt vague and muted. The way a scream might if he were underwater. The only thing that existed was her, in this moment._

_“This is dangerous,” she reminded him._

_“Being a soldier is dangerous.” He slid his hands up her thighs until they rested on her hips. His fingers dipped into the dimples on her back._

_She leaned forward and he felt her breath warm his face. He caught her lips in his and kissed her long and slowly. They pulled away, enough for her to take his face in her hands and press her forehead to his._

_“_ Life _is dangerous,” he continued, allowing his hands to roam the expanse of her back, brushing over smooth, sadistic scars that served as an agonizing reminder of all the times he’d hurt her. His hand settled over the center of her spine, right over the array that caused them both so much pain. Caused an entire people their lives. His fingers curled in against it, but he didn’t feel hot anguish the way he might have expected to. He only felt her skin. “It’s also too damn short.”_

_He rolled over her so that her head fell against his pillow. He looked into her rich brown eyes, realizing suddenly just how fortunate he was to be able to see them. Maybe he didn’t need eyes to know she was beautiful, but even with that, there was something in that look that drew him into her more intimately than sex ever could. They were the eyes of his master’s daughter, the sniper at the Academy, the lamenting killer in Ishval, his Lieutenant who promised to follow him into Hell, and the woman who managed to love him when he deserved to be dead._

* * *

 

When it finally comes time to hand in her documents, she rises from her desk to meet him at his. Without a word, he looks up and he exchanges his stack for hers, their hands brushing deliberately in the process.

“You looked busy,” she comments. “Maybe there won’t be any mistakes.”

“Hey,” he says, settling back into his seat with a crooked grin, “I always work hard.”

“Tell that to your date,” Havoc grumbles across the room. “And all the ones before and after her.”

* * *

 

_There was only her. Her skin melding into his. Her blood sinking through his veins. Her heart pulsing in his chest. She was beneath him, around him, inside of him, ubiquitous like some sort of ethereal work of magic he could only ever deserve in his dreams._

_His fingers slipped in between hers and she gripped him tightly. For so long, he led and she followed. But right now, they moved together, breathed together, existed together._

_They protected each other because that was how they knew how to function. But never once were they dishonest. Never once did the other not know the depths of the other’s pain, fear, and desperation. For as long as they’ve been together, they were a single heart. She breathed in, he breathed out. And this moment was nothing more than the physical manifestation of that which has always been true. No, not only true. Irrevocable. Indisputable. A law written in the stars and pervasive in every individual thread of the universe._

_Her heart raced to the rhythm of his pulse. But still, she hooked a leg around him and pulled herself closer, closer, closer. Because even moving as one, and giving palpable meaning to everything they ever were to each other, they could never be close enough._

_She gasped, and exhaled in a deep moan that struck him like music, reverberating through him as its own bassline. She pressed her open mouth to the hot, bare skin of his shoulder and whispered his name. Not his rank. But his name._

_“Roy.”_

* * *

 

She sits at her desk to read through the documents from the General. Diligent as he was, she finds his work to be a perfect reflection of that. Until she flips to the second to last page where a haphazardly added slip of paper falls to her lap. She casts a glance in his direction, but he’s immersed in the stack she left with him.

Riza’s eyes slide in the direction of her teammates and no one appears to be paying her any mind. She brings the page back onto her desk and studies it with a fluttering heart. 

* * *

 

Dangerous,  _Roy thought, despite everything. Because something so extraordinary could not possibly be good for either of them. The world just didn’t work that way. There was no bliss without pain, and this moment was not without the memory of all their grief._

_And yet._

_It was beautiful without sense and beyond measure. And Roy would endure that agony tenfold for the rest of his life if it meant this moment with this woman, this integral piece of his heart, could be real._

_“Riza,” he said, trying on her first name for size, perhaps. Then she trembled in his arms, crying out into his shoulder. He gasped and said her name again, in a gentle whisper. And over and over again as she unraveled nerve-by-nerve underneath him._

_Yes, it was dangerous. Maybe they didn’t deserve it. Maybe it was downright reprehensible and would end in nothing but more pain, because that’s all the world has ever found suitable for them. But it didn’t matter. She was worth it. She was worth everything._

* * *

 

It’s a note that would mean nothing to anyone outside the two of them. Hell, it would mean nothing to even their teammates. A short, sloppy scrawl on a scrap piece of paper.

* * *

 

_When it was over, she turned away, curling into herself. He caught sight of her back, the rippling scars gleaming in the low lamplight._

_“Hey,” he said softly, reaching out to touch her, but she recoiled the moment his hand made contact with her skin. He felt his heart constrict in his chest._

_“We shouldn’t do this again,” she said, a slight tremor to her voice. Riza still wouldn’t face him and something cold formed in the pit of his stomach._

_“You have goals,” she continued, “and so do I. Our first priority is Amestris. You know that. This was…”_

_“Reckless,” he finished, his voice hollow._

_Her shoulders drew in and he knew from too many long nights on the battlefield, and years of learning the individual movements, mannerisms, and afflictions that comprised her, that this was how she cried when she didn’t want anybody to see._

_“I don’t regret it,” she said, a little more delicately. Her shoulders expanded as she drew in a long breath. “I wish I did. I’d feel better about myself if I did.”_

_“You don’t have to punish yourself for the rest of your life,” Roy said, because he knew that her self-loathing ran far deeper than the talk about goals and their country she futilely used as camouflage. It was somewhat of a familiar mechanism to him._

_“It’s more than that.”_

_“I know,” he said, because he did. Because Amestris was his priority too. But it was only the surface of something too multi-layered to delve into out loud. “But you don’t deserve to torture yourself.”_

_“We can’t risk everything,” she said._

_“What if I’ve weighed out my options?”_

_“_ We can’t risk everything _, General.”_

* * *

 

Riza closes her eyes, rubbing her thumb over the ink-formed words as she mulls over how much she hates herself. She can’t even bring herself to wish she didn’t love him. The perpetual ache in her chest, the one she’s learned to quell after years of pain, to the point that she’s almost grown immune to it, feels too good. Because it’s real.

* * *

 

_She was very quiet for a long stretch of time. Roy inched closer to her and rested the palm of his hand over the scar on her shoulder blade. This time, she didn’t move away, rather, she melted into his touch._

_“Giving me flame alchemy,” he said, brushing her hair away from the base of her neck so he could leave a kiss on the sensitive skin in its wake, “was a risk. Overthrowing the Fuhrer was an even bigger one. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to play it safe from this point on. You said you’d follow me, and making reckless decisions sometimes comes with the territory. That’s how someone changes the world.”_

_His hand followed the curve of her waist and she leaned her back into his chest, inviting him to touch her. He closed his eyes, pressing his nose to her neck as his palm explored every exposed inch of skin, from her hardened thighs to her soft belly, to her breasts, collarbone, and jaw. He wanted to memorize every part of her. To burn it into his memory, not necessarily to negate the anguish but quell it some. Remind him that there was beauty in the world._

_His lips ghosted over the scar on her neck and she shivered._

_Everything, from her scars, the callouses on her hands, and the way she turned to butter when he touched her the right way, was markedly Riza Hawkeye. And he found it astounding how the same world that dished out so much horror gave him something so incredible._

* * *

 

LIEUTENANT IRVING WILL BE JOINING US ALONG WITH COLONEL DUNNE. I ASKED OLIVIER IF SHE AND MAJOR NETTING WOULD BE SO KIND AS TO JOIN US, BUT BOTH DECLINED. MAJOR THOMAS, HOWEVER, HAS AGREED TO COME ALONG.

Riza runs the back of her pen over each name. Irving. Dunne. Olivier. Netting. Thomas.

* * *

 

_“Do you regret this?” she asked, a wary edge to her voice._

_Immediately, he replied, “No.”_

_So she sank against him, for a while responding with nothing but even breaths that pushed and pulled in unison with his own._

_“Then I’ll ask you again tomorrow,” she decided, resting her hand on the arm that he curled around her. “And if you still don’t, then we can talk about more reckless decisions.”_

* * *

 

Irving. Dunne. Olivier. Netting. Thomas.

_I don’t._


End file.
